Fanfare for the Common Man: My imaginary girlfriend

Every so often it happens.You get friend requests on Facebook from these young women stuck in seductive poses. They invite you to come check out their pages full of hot and exciting photographs. These are young ladies with names like Amber, Misty, and Co-co and you hit the DELETE button quickly because guys my age can go to jail for stuff like this.And while I’m on Facebook to increase my Internet presence to promote my writing, there is a line drawn somewhere out there in the sand that I will not cross. If you are the same age as my kids, I’m not biting.This week, though, has started out kind of interesting.I got “Catfished.”On Monday a lovely young thing from Texas named Jennifer sent me a friends request and out of boredom mostly, I accepted. For the next hour or so while I enjoyed my coffee we exchanged a few messages. Her replies were of the one and two word variety. Her profile didn’t offer much information other than a couple of alluring photographs.She had a dozen friends.All guys.She asked if I wanted to settle down into a long distance relationship and my reply was “Why me?”Silence followed and 20 minutes later I discovered I’d been un-friended.I was heartbroken, sort of.I almost had me an imaginary girlfriend.Then on Tuesday I woke up to a second Facebook request, this time from a foxy 30-year old brunette out of St. Augustine, Florida named Carolyn. She’s a nursing student, single, who likes to hunt, swim and fish. I thought, “Wow!” If she could just open beer bottles with her teeth she’d be the perfect woman, right?Carolyn was more engaging than Jennifer. She asked what I liked to do for fun, but didn’t understand my sense of humor when I replied with, “I like to pull the wings off flies and watch them fly around in circles and toss kittens off the Interstate overpass to see if the legend that cats always land feet first is really true.”She replied with, “What do you mean by that?”I then replied again with the “Why me?” and instead of disappearing Carolyn replied with, “Because you have a loving profile.”Okay, those of you who are my Facebook friends, go pull up my profile real quick and tell me, what is it about a profile picture of a crotchety old man, in sunglasses, and sporting a lecherous grin that says “Loving Profile?”Sadly, Carolyn bolted when I told her how my checking account was overdrawn, I lived alone in a van down by the river, and piggy backed wireless off the seafood restaurant next door.I told her all this could be hers if she was still interested, that there was room enough on my inflatable mattress for two, but she had already un-friended me by that point.And here I thought, dang, I can’t even get me an imaginary girlfriend. That’s pretty sorry.Mantei T’eo got one, why can’t I?Mantei’s imaginary girlfriend imaginary died right before the big game with Southern Cal. What a tragic love story.As I’m scouring the far recesses of my brain for new book ideas, I keep coming up with, “I want me one of them imaginary girlfriends.”Just think of the romance novel I could write with that.You hear the Nike jingle, “I wanna be like Mike?”Well, I wanna be like Mantei.

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